A Right Fine Life: Kit Carson on the Santa Fe Trail
My pappy followed Daniel Boone down the Wilderness Trail to Kentucky Tweren’t but two years before we moved on to Boon’s Lick Missouri Pappy built a cabin and cleared some land My big brothers Andrew and Robert came back from the West to help out They told me stories of sights no greenhorn had yet laid eyes on But as I wasn’t sproutin up tall and scrappy like them Pappy set his hopes for me on book learning and sent me off to school Maybe we can make a lawyer of ya little man he laughed Could be a proper refined life lawyering When a tree fell on Pappy and kilt him I set to working the farm like a grown man Mama suggested I might best be a farmer like Pappy Ya might yet make a decent enough life she said right here in Boon’s Lick But when Mama got herself married again I didn’t take kindly to being treated like a hired hand by my new pa That’s how I come to be apprenticed to Mr Workman in his saddler’s shop right smack on the edge of the western frontier in Franklin Missouri From the shop window I watched folks with passels of younguns packing packing up prairie schooners for the hard trail northwest up to Oregon country Traders were rigging their freight wagons too for the long dangerous trail to Santa Fe
Mr Workman was right fond of saying Franklin’s gonna be a boomtown Outfitting wagon trains could soon be a right prosperous enterprise But rigging out other folks for adventures sure weren’t my idea of living The first real mountain men I laid eyes on worked on the wagon trains as guides and buffalo hunters Some were tough old buzzards with long tangled beards Others weren’t much older than me I repaired their gear while they spun their far-fetched yarns They showed me how to make a sheath for a skinning knife and a possibles bag for squirreling away any such thing as might come in handy I made myself a fancy one from scraps with my name tooled on the flap I put a flint and a bit of iron a button an old needle a length of string and a sliver of soap inside
